If you missed out on RubyConf 2013 in Miami a few weeks ago, you’ll be happy to know Confreaks just released the first batch of recorded talks from the conference. I would definitely make time for Object management on Ruby 2.1 by Koichi Sasada who I mentioned on the show recently for his work on the Ruby 2.1 generational garbage compiler. In a less Ruby-centric way, you have to watch Nell Shamrell’s Harnessing the True Power of Regular Expressions in Ruby. Keep an eye on Confreaks since there are many more talks to come.

Ruby Lint is a linter and static code analysis tool for Ruby. Just like JSHint and other linting tools, it focuses on logic­related errors, rather than semantic errors that are displayed in standard Ruby output. So, if you are trying to use a variable that you haven’t defined, it’ll tell you, instead of outputting a no method error. Ruby Lint tackles undefined methods/variables, unused variables/method arguments and more.

This week, Gavin Miller published a new blog post on memoization covering more advanced memoization patterns. In this post, Gavin shows how to memoize more complex methods like those which have conditionals inside of them or even methods that receive arguments. It’s a quick and useful read, and memoization might allow you to tackle some low-hanging performance fruits in your Ruby applications.

Sam Goldstein just created a neat little gem called Timetrap, a simple tool to help you track time right on the command line. Once you install the gem on your machine, Timetrap will keep track of a list of timesheets. Each timesheet has many entries, and you can check in-and-out of a timesheet as you need to. After you’ve created some entries in your timesheet, you can display the entries, showing information like the date, time in and out, duration, and notes, all right there in your console. Timetrap has built-in support for 6 output formats, including text, csv, ical, json, and ids. There’s even an interface for writing custom formats.

Richard Schneeman recently created a gem called Better Sprockets Errors. Its very simple purpose is to raise exceptions in development when you attempt to include assets that have not been white-listed for precompilation. Check out the project's README for links to pull requests on the Sprockets repo.

I recently read a new post on the Ruby Love blog about idiomatic Ruby. This post walks through a great refactoring exercise, showing how you can write more Ruby-esque code -- for example, iterating through an enumerable using .map instead of .each, returning a result with send, and cleaning up conditionals using a ternary operator.

Linda Liukas — one of the Rails Girls co-founders — is putting together an illustrated children's book about Ruby. She’s writing the story of a little girl (Ruby) and a robot (the computer) to represent and explains some basic Ruby and programming concepts. It doesn't look like the book is anywhere near ready yet but Linda is publishing excerpts on her blog, and you can sign up to be notified about this lovely little project.

Keep track of your consoles with marco-polo, get a head start on sass with Bitters, smaller payloads with Rack::Deflater, Heroku open-sources its authentication, Heroku Postgres 2.0, and the MotionInMotion screencasts all in this episode of the Ruby5!j